Reliance Life Sciences has made an RT-PCR kit that can provide coronavirus test results in about 2 hours, reports said. At present, a real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (rRT-PCR) test takes up to 24 hours to give a result.
According to a person privy to the development, computational biologists at Reliance Life Sciences have analyzed over 100 genomes of SARS-CoV-2 sequenced in India to design unique RT-PCR primers for coronavirus detection.
Reliance Life Sciences is a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Ltd. At present, RT-PCR test is considered to be of the best standard in Covid-19 test.
R-Green Kit
The kit has been named R-Green Kit (SARS COV2-real-time PCR) and sources said that it has been technically validated by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) for satisfactory performance. However, ICMR’s validation does not certify user-friendliness and does not approve or disapprove of the design of the kit.
According to sources, the kit developed by the company can detect the presence of R-gene, E-gene, RdRp gene of coronavirus with Actin as an internal control. ICMR results stated that it shows 98.8 per cent specificity and 98.7 per cent sensitivity.
The kit has been developed indigenously by the research and development scientists working at the firm. Reports said that the best advantage of the kit is that it is easy to use. The kit uses readily available primers and simple reagents which can be synthesized in our country.
Meanwhile, a separate study has been conducted by Reliance Life Sciences and the finding indicates that the coronavirus death rate may significantly reduce at the end of this year. It showed that mutation occurrence of structural and non-structural proteins of coronavirus form over 7,000 genome sequences of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
